The last entry in this journal says Day 100. This one says 466. The count doesn’t pause anymore — it marks every working day since this journal began, whether I wrote here or not. Three hundred and sixty-six of them have passed. This is what they turned into.
Blame the light. It’s summer in Seattle, which means the sun is up around six and doesn’t leave until nine, and those long days hand you hours you didn’t have in February and dare you to waste them. I always have more energy in summer. So: shake it off, pick the project back up, and try some new things.
The biggest new thing is the one you’re looking at. I’ve redesigned the entire site — really used my design skills this time, rather than negotiating with a template. Back on Day 22 I wrote that I was saving the big customizations for when I could code them myself. This is that. Built slowly, bit by bit, on evenings and weekends: new layouts, new photography, and new publications — the Dog Breed Field Guide is its own blog now, the first of several guides on an ever-growing roadmap. This entry is the relaunch.
Here’s what the gap held. Day 100 ended with a hard pivot toward stable income, and it worked: I’m working full time, at work I’m good at — and learning more about e-commerce checkout than I ever imagined needing to know. There’s a funny symmetry in that. The day job and the evening shift have started feeding each other.
The making never really stopped, either. Six new collections are in progress and planned to launch soon — cats, finally, among others I’ll keep quiet about a little longer.
But the improvement I’m proudest of is the least visible one: custom work has a real mechanism now. More than half the dogs in America are mixed breeds — which means for half of you, no breed collection will ever be quite right. People don’t want an approximation of their dog. They want their dog: the exact ears, the particular patchwork, the one-of-one. Now there’s a proper way to ask for exactly that.
And somewhere in the gap — in the feedback, the stories people share about their dogs, the perspective a year of distance gives — the purpose of this whole thing came into focus. It was never really about products. This site exists to bring more love into the world. The name was the mission statement all along; it just took 466 days to say it plainly.
Day 1 of this journal said the beginning is loud and everything after is quiet. This is the quiet part — small decisions, made on long summer evenings, in the same direction. The days are long right now. I intend to use them.
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